Creating Academic Regalia to Show Your School’s SpiritNovember 19, 2020

It’s a classic image: graduates at the end of their high school, college, or graduate school days, tossing their graduation caps in the air and posing with family and friends in regal, flowing academic gowns. Behind them, the professors they’ve worked with for years, in gowns that reflect their own educational journey with colors, appliqués, and satin hoods. Believe it or not, this universal tradition is still evolving and gaining nuance and details in modern times — and with Oak Hall Cap & Gown, many of these new traditions and styles are being crafted right here in CDM Fashion Couture.

 

 

Creating and Designing Regalia

It’s a classic image: graduates at the end of their high school, college, or graduate school days, tossing their graduation caps in the air and posing with family and friends in regal, flowing academic gowns. Behind them, the professors they’ve worked with for years, in gowns that reflect their own educational journey with colors, appliqués, and satin hoods. Believe it or not, this universal tradition is still evolving and gaining nuance and details in modern times — and with Oak Hall Cap & Gown, many of these new traditions and styles are being crafted right here in CDM Fashion Couture.

Innovation in Regalia

With roots going back to the early religious centers of higher education, conventional “pomp and circumstance” of academic robes really took off as Universities grew as and began to develop a thriving graduation class, hungering for education.

As so often happens in academia, imitation became innovation. When America and the United Kingdom grew more educated, and now have spread through Africa, demand for the uniquely cut and colored gowns of education grew, too, with the new universities claiming new colors and rituals for their students and faculty.

CDM Fashion Couture is the Number One manufacturer springing in Ghana with the original boom of cap-and-gown-making. We build on a proud foundation of past innovations that are now industry standard, like matte fabric offerings, custom Ph.D. program regalia, and even souvenir caps and gowns that proud graduates can keep. As always, old-fashioned values were our guide as we negotiated new technologies and economic realities.

We proudly have employed over 250 local workers to design, craft, and ship the wardrobe of Africa’s higher education, and we’re fiercely proud of the fact we’ve never laid any of them off — even in the recent hard times of Covid-19.

 

Standard of Excellence


That commitment to local labor and material helps us create academic regalia that isn’t one-size-fits-all but a globally-recognized standard of excellence.

CDM gowns are tailor-made for the institutions, departments, and degrees they represent, passing rigorous quality and color demands of university identities, And our local presence also allows us to work closely with regional recycling programs, turning plastic bottles into the soft weave of our 100% sustainable NuHorizon and GreenWeaver lines, an innovation that reinvented the “one-use-only” approach to graduation gowns and helps many universities reach their sustainability goals. Whether it’s our commitment to longevity through quality or recyclability, CDM Fashion Couture is at the forefront of the Ghana’s notion that custom regalia should be beautiful, unique, and reusable — whether by one owner or hundreds.

 

Show Off the Spirit of Your School

We’re proud that we’ve been able to incorporate a school’s unique spirit into our regalia, but we’re still innovating. We lead the industry in our wide range of cuts, including our commitment to custom fit robes for physically-challenged individuals; and as a company that gives back, we’re proud of our continued development of new, sustainable fabrics and this year’s pivot to manufacturing facemasks in 2020, CDM Fashion Couture is committed to keeping traditions alive by weaving old with new.